On Wednesday night, I got to meet the latest crop of Heritage Scholars. All the freshmen and some of the upperclassmen gathered in Blatchley, divided into teams, and set off on a photo scavenger hunt across campus with the goal of getting as many photo items as possible while getting to know our group. I was on a team with two freshmen, Colton and Demir, and a Russell, a junior.

Fall semester is among us!

Unpacking and getting class-ready have consumed my first week on campus, and after my first couple days of classes, I feel like I'm already back in the college routine. It seriously feels like I never left for the summer! It has been sooooo nice to catch up with friends on campus, and it is great to see new faces on campus too. Here is a brief synopsis of my week back in Caldwell...

I generally despise blogs that take the form of lists. I think they are way too easy and do not pressure the writer to come up with a nice narrative/argument. But they have their advantages. For atarters, they are easy to read. Why do you think Cracked.com gets so many hits? Also, they are easy to write. And fast. And because I have to head out and actually work, I will just make a list, to tell you of the length and the breadth of my activities since my last blog post.

My time at The College has given me a lot of things. It's fostered many passions, advised simultaneous skepticism and open-thinking, and granted me chances for both exploration and (just as necessary) failure. All of these things, while granting me many different types of knowledge, have given me a special window to learn about my personal growth.

The life of a college student can be hectic. Alarm clocks, piles of homework, keeping social lives from ruining academic lives--it's a delicate balancing act which can end up being particularly stressful if you start losing your footing. I handled it all pretty well last year, but I already know this year is going to be slightly different. I've picked up quite a few more activities in the past week alone than i ever expected I'd be doing when I was a freshman. If I was on a balance beam before, I must be on a tightwire now.

So the first week has ended (a very short week, mind you) and already I have been assigned an abundance of reading from my professors, attended a rave and harvested some succulent melons from the garden. Not much has changed on the homework front but looking around campus, I can tell that my last year at C of I will not be dull. Changes have been made to the McCain Cafe, such as the introduction of plates and cutlery (not just paper plates.) This greatly pleases me as it means that we will now be reusing plates instead of sending scores of paper plates and to-go boxes into the dump.

This week has been so full, I don’t even know where to start! The morning of the McCall trip, we had a morning workout, and I was in the ice bath until about 10:10, and hadn’t packed yet. I rushed over to my dorm, on the exact opposite side of campus and threw a few things in a bag, including a half-filled water bottle (a true blessing, considering IdaHaven’s sulfur-rich “fart water”), a few sweatshirts, and I grabbed my thin sleeping bag and slipped on some shoes. I made it on the bus by 10:30 and had a grand time speed dating on the bus.

Every year on the first day of school, my dad insists upon taking a first-day-of-school picture. College disturbs this ritual a little since my dad isn’t in Caldwell to snap a photo to mark my first day of class. But it’s too much of tradition to forego entirely, so my parents got a text bright and early containing my instragram version of a first-day-of-school picture.

I'll be honest--when I bought this scroll in Disney World a couple of years ago, it was only because I thought it looked pretty sweet hanging in the small Epcot shop that was selling them. I'm a sucker for Asian calligraphy, and this was about as authentically Japanese as I could hope to find, so it was an easy decision to buy it.